The Google Logo Change

Roughly 2 weeks ago the whole world was introduced to a new logo we are going to see a lot every day. The big and famous Google changed its logo to be more universal for all its brands. This logo change comes together with the structural change Google went through, making it an entity under its new parent; Alphabet. In this post I will show Google’s intentional meaning of the style, the practical use of it and provide you with the effect on the stock prices and shareholder sentiment.

The old logo, introduced in 1999, was famous for its sharp turns, hard edges and slightly medieval look. The ‘little tails’ on these letters, the so called serifs, are replaced by an entire new font called ‘Product Sans’. Google profiled the style as ‘simple, uncluttered, colourful and friendly’ and stated that the logo is the start of a new future for Google (which makes sense with the earlier mentioned structural change). Twitter exploded on the first of September, the day of the change, shouting that the logo was awfully childish or that the logo was perfectly balanced with the letters flowing into each other. A big plus for me is that Google kept its logo youthful and dynamic for such a big corporation but created a playful touch with the ‘Heineken-e’.

For me all these style statements do not say very much. In my eyes you like or dislike the new style, but bear in mind that everyone’s opinion will change over time. What is undeniably true is that the new style is much more practical than the old one. This is where Google is doing business. The old logo was designed for a desktop screen in 1999. Now, the logo has to appear on different sized screens (computer or TV), smartphones, watches and so on. The logo is much more scalable and adaptable than the old one, which makes it much more efficient to change it for any type of interface. Besides the size of a screen, Google also has to work with multiple different applications and add-ons like Gmail, Google Drive, Maps and Chrome. With the new logo, all different logos have the same style (maybe you remember the blue app for Google which was completely out of style).

When looking at stock prices and sentiment, I cannot conclude anything shocking. What you see in stock price is that traders were holding back awaiting the release on September first. After the release, prices are increasing including today. This shows that the logo has more positive than negative influence. The analyst sentiment is at the maximum and this has been so for the last 3 months.

All in all, I had to look at the logo a couple of times before liking it but I think it is a very clever move of Google. Since the company is digital, the physical changes of the logo in offices will not be that costly if you compare it with all the benefits.

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